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de Gournay at the San Francisco Fall Art and Antiques Show 2018

Founded in 1981, the San Francisco Fall Art & Antiques Show is the best known international fair of its kind on the West Coast. Each year, an extraordinary range of fine and decorative arts of all styles and from every era is presented by leading dealers from across North America and Europe. The show is the major fundraiser for Enterprise for Youth: an initiative helping young adults of San Francisco with the transition from high school into college and the world of work.

de Gournay were again excited to be contributing hand painted wallpapers to the bespoke schemes of four exceptional interior designers – each allocated a vignette space at the fair entrance and a creative theme of “The Sun, The Moon & The Stars; Celestial Imagery in Art, Antiques & Design”

A veritable doyenne of the design industry, Charlotte Moss’ elegant interiors have been celebrated for their singular blend of American, European and classical influences since 1985.

Choosing as her medium the scenic paper of de Gournay’s panoramic collection, Moss envisaged an Italian landscape rendered in a soft, painterly style to evoke the enveloping haze of Umbrian sunshine.

The rolling hills of Tuscany, lined with Cypress Trees and Umbrella Pines, were depicted between languorously draped curtains in Blue and White pane check – placing the viewer in an imagined arbour, shaded from the heat: “The perfect place for a nap, that is, until Italy summons”.

Inspired by the drawings of 18th century set designer, decorator and painter Antonio Basoli, Moss briefed de Gournay’s artists to create the same melding of Basoli’s atmospheric work and the alluring Italian landscape.

Ken Fulk

Renowned for highly creative and visually arresting interiors, Ken Fulk has specialized in a multi-disciplinary approach to design since 1997 – resulting in an extensive portfolio comprising residential and commercial at a consistently dramatic scale. A self-styled ‘Master of Surprise’, his eponymous firm has developed a reputation for transforming dreams into reality.

With his ever expansive imagination, Fulk spun a tale of an 80’s era “Zodiac Bar” embellished with a bejewelled wallpaper representing the astrological signs centred around a giant, radiating starburst. Era specific references of Christian Lacroix costume jewellery and Bob Mackie’s elaborate costumes for Cher unfolded in a fictional tale of a “Russian Hill residence with a speakeasy-style lounge where Champagne flowed until dawn and San Francisco’s jet set revelled in the late-night shenanigans of legendary gossip”.

The creative dialogue between Fulk and Jemma Cave, de Gournay’s director of design, led eventually to the Temple of Dendur – the ancient Egyptian sandstone shrine displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – giving the concept a more solid sense of setting. The iconography of the Zodiac symbols likewise mimicked to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, but amidst a Sherbet hued evocation of 1980’s glamour with hand embroidered metallics.

The resulting composition was a wondrous tapestry of colour and form – showcasing de Gournay’s very latest hand stitched beading and embroidery techniques: haute couture level craftsmanship employed into an environmental narrative.

The Wiseman Group

Recognized as one of the USA’s leading design firms, Paul Vincent Wiseman founded The Wiseman Group in 1980 and has steadily developed a reputation for interiors of an essential quality increasingly rare in the field. His concept for ‘The Stars’ looked to the ‘assemblage’ works of American artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell – imagining a set piece style composition of multiple parts collated in an ethereal depiction of a starlit night sky.

Stars are hand painted and grid lines hand gilded upon an uneven deep blue painted silk base. Layers of torn and antiqued Xuan paper (hand made rice paper) are then layered over the celestial sky to create a scaled up interpretation of Cornell’s maquette style pieces that frequently referenced astral constellations.

Madeline Stuart

Los Angeles based Madeline Stuart works with a wide-ranging clientele in a collaborative manner that explores the interplay between function and form. Stuart’s initial concepts referenced 20th Century Japanese artist Matazo Kayama, who’s work utilised a graphic aesthetic between painting and photography in the depiction of traditional motifs. Alongside a curated array of Chinese, Japanese and Korean furniture, sculpture and objects, Madeline worked with de Gournay to create an imposing lunar vista on a dark antiqued silver leaf ground: a visual reflection on the astronomical body that “lives in the dark yet illuminates shadows – the perfect half of a whole: a giant orb in elegant sliver. How magical its mystery, how magnificent its romance.”

Against this imposing spherical form, a flock of cranes is silhouetted in flight, whilst scudding clouds reveal themselves on closer inspection to be rendered in a 3-dimensional rippling bas relief technique. The raised ripples in the clouds are polished so that they catch the light and stand out from the antiqued charcoal recesses.